Long before Sorry to Bother You taught moviegoers the meaning of code-switching – the act of altering how you express yourself based on your audience – I learned its power by listening to my father take phone calls. While checking in with his mother in Georgia he’d drift into a black southern lilt, subtly prolonging vowel sounds as he reverted to his childhood timbre. From there, he’d answer calls from his white co-workers, ingratiating himself with carefree enthusiasm and a formal syntax while deftly employing his lawyerly lexicon.

But at the barbershop, my father was best at being himself. As soon as the shop’s door swung open, I’d watch him relax his stance before strutting towards the owner of the shop. As if preparing to bounce, he’d walk with a slight bend in his knee, greeting him with an ardent “My man!” before dapping him up. From there, he’d pay similar respects to the other barbers and fellow customers, often extending a hug to the older women waiting for their sons, smiling at shopgoers the way you smile at family. And as the barbershop buzzed with local gossip and philosophical debate alike, I’d hang on my father’s every word, listening to him drop the “r” from “brother” or the “l” from “alright” or the “g” from seemingly any verb. At the shop, he was cool in a way only black people can be cool.

My father’s example taught me to love the way black people speak. But the way he seamlessly shifted between dialects led me to question how people valued the voices he used to address them. In Boots Riley’s newly released film, which centers on a black man who discovers his “white voice”, the main character is forced to reckon with a similar conflict.

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Thanks to the breakout film, code-switching has re-emerged in America’s racial discourse. When Einar Haugen introduced the term in 1954, he sought to describe the fluid nature with which multilingual people moved between languages. Since then, the term has expanded to capture how individuals adjust all forms of communication and expression based on their audience. Whether you’re a bilingual Puerto Rican seamlessly switching between Spanish and English, or you’re simply addressing your grandparents with added formalities, you’re code-switching. But Sorry to Bother You, a fantastical dystopian satire, paints a darker picture of this natural linguistic technique.

Soon after the main character, Cassius Green, begins a new job as a telemarketer – and fails to make a single sale – a black co-worker offers a radical suggestion: “Let me give you a tip. You wanna make some money here? Use your white voice.” Cassius’s new white voice quickly becomes his greatest asset.

Sorry to Bother Youthen uses Cassius’s surreal code-switching to illustrate the tragedy of assimilation, but the reality of the linguistic act is far more complex.And as a tool for social mobility – or in the case of black people, a tool for survival – it must be examined for both its power and potential peril.

From navigating job interviews to ingratiating oneself with clientele, there are countless reasons people of color code-switch in white spaces. But historically, code-switching has served as a defense against linguistic discrimination: a form of bias that is partially implicit. In one study, the psycholinguist Shiri Lev-Ari determined that we’re “less likely to believe something if it’s said with a foreign accent”. Lev-Ari also found that trust decreases when exposed to non-native languages, meaning our brains are predisposed to unconscious, linguistic discrimination. But even for black people who are native English speakers, dialectic discrimination abounds.

During a 1999 study, the black researcher and linguist John Baugh sought to test the severity of such discrimination. To do so, he called landlords across California to inquire about housing opportunities while alternating between “African American vernacular English” (AAVE), “Chicano English”, and “standard American English”. In doing so, he found that in predominantly white areas of California such as Palo Alto, San Francisco and Woodside, standard English resulted in more “confirmed appointments to view apartments advertised” by up to 50%. Therefore, in the search for modern essentials like housing, code-switching can provide access often denied to black people. This is why the comedian Dave Chappelle – who incorporates a satirical white voice into his standup routines – once said: “Every black American is bilingual. All of us. We speak street vernacular, and we speak job interview.”

When black people can be killed for simply being themselves, code-switching presents a form of self-protection

But despite our best comedic efforts, code-switching, now more than ever, is less than a laughing matter. Police brutality, which has resulted in unarmed black men being killed by police at 3.49 times the rate of unarmed white men, has rendered one’s blackness a perpetual signifier of danger. To date, black people have been killed by police for walking to their apartment, carrying a toy gun, staring, and many other harmless acts too ordinary to be worthy of death. When black people can be killed for simply being themselves, code-switching presents itself as a form of self-protection.

The harsh reality of linguistic profiling has even spurred educators to bring code-switching into the classroom. In 2014, the University of Michigan professor Holly Craig introduced Toggle Talk, which provided lesson plans intended to help students acknowledge and shift between the English spoken in their homes and standard “academic” English. On one hand, the Toggle Talk curriculum legitimizes AAVE as a true dialect with its own syntactical rules and standards. On the other, it risks formalizing a hierarchy between traditionally white and black speech patterns, encouraging students as young as five to view one as more beneficial than the other.

Instead, we should be teaching black children – and all children from communities unconstrained by standard English – to love their most natural forms of expression. Rather than criticizing code-switching, we should criticize the conditions under which it occurs. After all, for black people, loving ourselves means loving the way we express ourselves to each other – cool in a way only black people can be cool.